Story Highlights

While we all look forward to the football matchups created by the SEC’s nonconference scheduling upgrade, it strikes me that the league has overstepped its bounds.

If a school wants to play four cupcakes as nonconference opponents, it should have that right. While I’m against that kind of scheduling in general because it asks fans to overpay for bad games, every program should be free to do what it believes is in its own best interest.

Now, however, every SEC school is having its hand forced. After a recent vote, future schedules of SEC teams must include at least one game against a team from one of the so-called power conferences — Big Ten, Pac-12, Big 12 or ACC.

For some schools, the change in scheduling policy is moot. Florida plays Florida State. Georgia and South Carolina have rivalry games against Clemson. Alabama likes to open with a tough nonconference team. Tennessee long has scheduled prime opponents (Oregon last season and Oklahoma this year).

Last season, three SEC teams (Arkansas, Kentucky, Texas A&M) would not have fulfilled this nonconference scheduling mandate. In the upcoming season, however, four SEC teams — Vanderbilt, Texas A&M, Ole Miss and Mississippi State — do not have games scheduled against a team from one of those four conferences.

Why force them to take the plunge if they don’t want to? It’s one thing to upgrade everybody’s schedule by adding another conference game (I’m on record as supporting a ninth SEC game), but each program should have the autonomy to schedule non-conference games to fit its own agenda.

One of the stated reasons behind the scheduling upgrade is that the committee selecting the entrants for the four-team playoff system will take strength of schedule into consideration. But how many of the SEC’s 14 football programs will be affected by that? This is still a conference of haves and have nots when it comes to football.

I figure there will be a push to schedule the bottom feeders from the four designated conferences. The running joke is that every SEC athletics director now has Indiana’s number on speed-dial. Remember, the Hoosiers are 15-73 in Big Ten games in the past 11 years. Look for Iowa State to become a popular dance partner. Wake Forest figures to be in play.

Meanwhile, the SEC did the right thing by retaining one permanent cross-division opponent. That leaves rivalries like Alabama-Tennessee and Georgia-Auburn on the books.

“Tradition matters in the SEC,” said Mike Slive, the conference commissioner.

Not everyone in the SEC is on board. LSU athletics director Joe Alleva, who was in the minority in a 10-4 vote, had pushed for eliminating the permanent crossover opponent because of the scheduling inequity it creates.

“I understand Alabama-Tennessee and Auburn-Georgia for the history, but that’s only four schools,” Alleva told the New Orleans Times Picayune. “The rest were voting in their own self-interest. They could have kept those games and the rest of us rotated. That was brought up but voted down.

“I’m not pushing for the self-interest of LSU. I’m pushing for equity.”

LSU’s permanent opponent from the Eastern Division is Florida.

Some outside the SEC footprint saw things differently, especially as the Big Ten, Big 12 and Pac-12 are all committing to nine conference games.

During a teleconference last week, several Pac-12 coaches criticized the SEC for standing pat at eight league games, suggesting that fewer conference games give the SEC an inside track to the four-team playoff.

“I think if we’re going into a playoff and feed into one playoff system, we all need to play by the same rules,” Stanford coach David Shaw said. “Play your conference. Don’t back down from playing your own conference. …

“We’re playing nine out of 12 teams in our conference. Why can’t you do the same thing?”

Washington State’s Mike Leach took a somewhat different tack, complimenting the SEC for holding that line by sticking with eight games while other conferences go to nine.

“I think they are elevating their conference, and I think they are fairly clever to do it,” he said.

But what happens if the committee filling out the four-team playoff bracket looks at the nation’s top half-dozen teams and determines that those who played tougher conference schedules deserved the four bids — and no SEC team made it?

That’s when you’ll see a nine-game SEC schedule.

David Climer’s columns appear on Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 615-259-8020 and on Twitter @DavidClimer.